Drawing Outside The Lines

The visual and interactive conventions of onine cartography have largely settled into variations on the theme that Google Maps established six years ago: orange roads, white dots with black outlines for places, sedate greens for parks. Freeways are thicker than surface roads, state labels are larger than city labels, and the West Side Highway and Kowloon Road both look pretty much the same.

What else could we do? What if we pushed harder?

Stamen Design have pushed the technical and visual conventions of online cartography since 2001. This presentation will highlight recent developments in artistic cartography done with technical rigor, and look at some examples from the other side of normal.

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Eric Rodenbeck

Stamen Design

Eric Rodenbeck is Stamen’s founder and creative director. He is a 10-year veteran of the interactive design field, and has spent this time working to extend the boundaries of online media and live information visualization.

Eric led the interactive storytelling and data-driven narrative effort at Quokka Sports, illustrated and designed at Wired and Wired Books, and was a co-founder of the design collective Umwow. He has lectured and spoken at Yale University, the University of Southern California, numerous O’Reilly technology conferences, Esther Dyson’s PC Forum, and South by Southwest, among others. Eric studied architecture at Cooper Union in New York City and received a B.A. in the History and Philosophy of Technology from The New School for Social Research.